Freight Napkin
A landed-cost estimator built for speed of answer over precision. Unit price is the easy part; duty, freight mode and carton maths are where the margin actually goes, and buyers needed a number in seconds, not a quote request.
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Design and build
- Built with
- TypeScript, Remix, Redis
The problem
Getting a real freight quote takes a day. Buyers were making go/no-go calls on unit price alone and getting surprised by landed cost later.
Approach
Deliberately an estimate, and it says so. The interface shows the assumption stack — carton fill, mode, duty rate — with every input editable inline, so a buyer can see which guess is carrying the answer and tighten just that one.
Being visibly approximate turned out to be the feature. A tool that admits a ±15% band gets used for screening; one that presents a false exact number gets distrusted after the first miss.